Re: Future of armv7

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 1:58 AM Sulev-Madis Silber
<freebsd-arch-freebsd-org789@ketas.si.pri.ee> wrote:
> why does fbsd support more 32bit arms than 64bit arms?
>
> if i look under allwinner section, i see 6 32bit socs and 3 64bit socs, why? allwinner has like, what, ~50, 64bit socs?! they come on devboards too
>
> one of them is h618 which has cheap boards on which has one dev who lost interest and one potential user with dusty hw. why is it like that? and then we plan to remove 32bit arms
>
> they also still make mips devices, which fbsd doesn't support anymore. those also target low power devices
>
> bbb has praised for being good hw and i have it too. it doesn't work even now? and what about it's brother, 64bit one? ti also still makes socs!

Open-Source can be used for free, but the development is not free,
even as individual you need to pay bills, food, tools, cat, lady, and
many more things that are not free, also you pay with your time that
you will never get back.

Who benefits most from you writing Open-Source for a specific
hardware? Hardware vendor and the whole supply chain right?

So what is the point of spending all of your own resources, including
time, just to make things working on a device, that in return bumps
sales of that device, when you have absolutely nothing in return?

How about any of these mentioned companies contract developers for
porting OS and drivers to their hardware?


> i'm not so much pissed of armv7 going but more like where's the aarch64 hw to move onto?

Alternative is always good point. But who will pay for porting OS to aarch64?


> is freebsd something where hw support is added, perfected, and quickly removed?

When you create complex software its maintenance over time is more
expensive than development and at some point it only becomes a burden
rather than asset.


> i also never get why whole world revolves around rpi's as they don't make best nor cheapest boards but i guess those would need support too then

Yes, also the documentation is problem here because they only care
about Linux, for some reason very popular, I guess its a good balance
between price and features / quality. Also rPI-5 is almost as powerful
as my old PC at 60x less power consumption. But FreeBSD does not work
there as on the PC.


> it would be awesome if fbsd would support arch that's common, be it armv7, aarch64, riscv64, or nga128 (completely made up 128bit next good arch platform)

Yes, in a perfect world Vendor would pay for drivers development for
their products (i.e. SoC / MCU) and the drivers are created in a way
that can be easily applied to any OS/RTOS no matter what their
internal API or license. But this is only a theory. I tried that for
years and failed. Open-Source crows is fighting each other while
Vendor accounts their sales income.


Reality is about what you wish and what you can, between what you do
and what are the results :-)

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info